As seven alien races struggle to co-exist in an uneasy alliance, the Inter-Stellar Union sends Union Guard agents on missions to preserve the crucial balance. These specialized operatives must do what regional security cannot, dealing with smugglers, pirates, terrorists, and even greater challenges in order to bring stability to a universe that needs it desperately. Without the Union Guard, the races will not be prepared to face a looming alien threat they can only hope to defeat together.

Friday, October 2, 2015

AI in Video Games (part 5)

How
will AI influence and change video games we play in the future? PC
and console hardware is getting more and more robust all the time, so
game developers are now facing new territory—games so vast that
they might not be able to fully playtest it before release. In the
recent past, many big-name game releases have been plagued with bugs
at the beginning, and developers scrambled post-release to patch the
problems that the gamers discovered—bugs that the developers
themselves couldn't possibly have discovered in the limited time they
had to produce the game. Once a game releases, hundreds of thousands
of gamers will be playing it, and if there's a bug to be found, it
won't take long. Consider the cost of hiring even a small portion of
that number of gamers to playtest a game—we'd rarely see any games
hit the market. The cost of an AI program, however, is much more
reasonable, and an AI can fully explore and test a game, reporting
back with data on all encountered errors. We may be seeing bigger and
better games released to the public much faster than we've seen
before, and these AI tested games are likely to have fewer bugs.
Imagine starting up a new game and being able to play it right away,
instead of waiting for an hour while a huge update patch slowly
downloads. Hard to imagine these days, but it's the wave of the
future!